Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are becoming increasingly popular for both business and residential applications. For instance, many companies are deploying WLANs in place of, or as an enhancement to, the corporate local area network. Additionally, many service industry businesses, e.g., restaurants and hotels, have deployed WLANs to provide customers with access to the Internet and/or other data networks. As WLANs have become increasingly more widespread, the number of applications designed for execution on WLAN-compliant stations has increased as well. For example, typical WLAN-compliant stations feature text messaging applications, Internet browsers, and streaming content players among other applications. A user may concurrently run any number of applications on a WLAN-compliant station.
It is particularly desirable to minimize signaling and control consumption of wireless resources in a shared resource wireless network as wireless system resources are finite and limited by the system bandwidth. Vast amounts of labor and capital have been expended to identify techniques that provide increased throughput in a shared resource system. In an IEEE 802.11 compliant network, for example, proposals have been made to improve medium access control (MAC) layer throughput by the use of single receiver station frame aggregation (SRA) or multiple receiver station frame aggregation (MRA). When MRA is employed, an aggregated frame contains one or more frames respectively directed to one or more of several stations. However, conventional MRA systems require that a station listen to an entire aggregated frame to identify the data addressed to the station. Such solutions may result in severe power drainage for power-constrained devices, such as mobile computational and communication devices. Moreover, conventional MRA systems require all data in an aggregate frame to be encoded at a common data rate. Because systems such as WLAN are expected to evolve in the future, to support multiple transmit and receive data rates, the requirement of a single data rate for frame aggregation is undesirably restrictive. Additionally, conventional WLAN-compliant stations provide a mechanism in which the medium is dedicated for use by a particular set of stations to provide power efficiency for battery limited stations. However, this solution has the deficiency of a loss of throughput that is evident by the merging of data to/from different stations.